August 29, 2004

hilzoy heals all wounds!

To quote Fafnir, "I have been noticin some anger in the world of late. Some of it has been comin from partisan wounds. I am wagging my finger in your direction Democrats and Republicans!" Thus the following silly thread. What are some of your favorite bizarre facts? Here are some of mine:

More of mine: there is one small area of Kentucky that contains the following towns: Rowdy, Dwarf, Mousie, Fisty, Happy, Typo, Hardshell, Softshell, Vortex, Quicksand, Shoulderblade, Dice, Spider, Viper, and, best of all, Whoopflarea?

-- Now that I think of it, there are also the joys of dreadful writing. CS Lewis claims somewhere to have found an long poem, in Miltonic blank verse, about eggs, part of which goes (from memory, so might be a bit off):

(Which Lewis translates as: some people don't like the yolks.) The idea that someone, somewhere, actually went to the trouble of writing this poem, on purpose, makes me happy; as does the existence of the poem "Ode to a Ten Ton Cheese", which I once found in one of those collections of bad poetry.

And one of my students once wrote a paper including the statement: "Descartes divides the truths into three groups: true, false, and on slim grounds", which is really kind of wonderful in its multilayered wrongness -- much more fun than some more normal error, like "For Kant, all our perceptions are subject to the bias of space and time."

Well, as a fanatic birder, I loved this post! My favorite has always been the Paltry Tyrannulet -- which also happens to be my secret name for Bush (can't see that here in AZ, but you can see the Northern Beardless-Tyrannulet).

Mad AZ monk: another fanatic birder! Yay! If in fact you do live in AZ, I'm jealous -- I spent a year in Tucson pre-birding, and the thought of what I could have seen if I had only been paying attention makes me crazy. (As does the thought that I lived for a while in the Middle East without paying attention to the birds -- and in that case, there are places I went where I could never now go as a tourist, at least not without taking my life in my hands.)

hilzoy--click on my name and check my blog, nothing but Hot Bird on Bird Action (and not even in the British sense!). We're going ape cuz a Long-tailed Jaeger just dropped into a lake east of Flagstaff. Like, the 10th state record ever.

Hmm, just in Death Valley alone you get both Badwater and Furnace Creek (appropos both, I assure you). In other parts of the park they don't even bother with a name. Teakettles (old ones) mark one junction and Crankshafts (broken) another.

Mad AZ Monk: cool. But it just amazed me (living as I do in MD) that anyone fanatic enough to design a bird website would only now be seeing his first Sanderling... No doubt birders all over Central Asia are similarly perplexed by our reaction to the Red-Footed Falcon :)

Hey, thanks. I haven't made a real effort to publish yet. Waiting to meet a patron...

I was thinking I should whip up a poem using the bird (or town) names in this thread but really I couldn't improve on just a list (I think Robert Pinsky is the reigning call-a-list-a-poem poet if you've got his email address). What's the other kind of go-away?

hilzoy--Believe it or not, I started birding in Maryland (Poolesville, to be exact) but never got to the shore. I'm kind of a fan of the provincial approach, working local patches through the seasons. But, as you know, it's a progressive disease and the distances I'll travel for good birds has lengthened considerably. A trip to southern France this May blew my mind. 62 lifers.

Do you keep state lists? Cuz the hot lick, of course, is that I saw the Sanderling in Arizona. I've lived here less than four years and already have 318 for the state.

I didn't go up for the falcon, mostly because I had to have surgery at just around that time. But we here in Maryland are keeping an eye out for it: it's left Martha's Vineyard and is expected to go south, so we figure it might put in an appearance on Assateague, if we're really lucky.

I also like the "bird your own patch" approach, though I will at times travel for birds. I just went to New Zealand, and while the main reason was that I had been asked to give a paper at a conference there, I spent the two weeks I tagged onto the trip birding, mostly. (99 new species; alas, no Kiwis, but five species of albatross, most at less than 20 feet.)

Yes, I was impressed about the Sanderling being in AZ. (What on earth was it thinking?) (For non-birders: it's a shorebird, and obviously shores are not AZ's long suit.) It's just that they are so common here. But then, in NZ Kelp Gulls are everywhere, and people found the fact that here in MD we are all thrilled about our one resident Kelp Gull similarly amusing.